


Medicine

by inthemouthofthewolf



Category: Original Work
Genre: Autobiography, BDSM, Bipolar Disorder, Dark Comedy, Dom/sub, Fluff, Healing, M/M, Mental Anguish, Mental Health Issues, Mental Illness, Schizoaffective, Schizophrenia, Self Prompt, Self-Acceptance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-29
Updated: 2013-11-29
Packaged: 2018-01-02 22:37:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1062469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inthemouthofthewolf/pseuds/inthemouthofthewolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>something I dredged up that I'd prompted myself to write a while back.<br/>It tries to describe my experiences, but there aren't very good words for it, but I tried. I thought it would help me gain control over these states.<br/>It didn't help very much.<br/>Shout out to my Keeper who gets me through the bad times and keeps me safe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Medicine

It was Serious when he stumbled up the long ascent, Merry little and lost in the shadows of the battle. There was so much blood and so many bodies on the fields, he was easy to be overlooked and assumed among the dead. He was a shade passing, himself, and the mist in his eyes was full of fear and haunting. He could not puzzle out why he was so afraid, that took far too much werewithal; he was not afraid of dying, of slipping past the curtain quicker and easier than falling asleep. It didn’t say much; falling asleep was quite difficult. Especially when things like this happened. A human body, a human mind was not meant to be torn from the fabric of time and space, he didn’t think. He was wandering and it was like coming home, but not coming home, he was drowning behind walls of water or blood and it distorted his vision when the lights were twinkling bright, coming to life around him, dancing. Everything was inexplicably all wrong and it was such a terrible feeling.

That was where his Keeper found his wild beast, doubled over and half bracing himself against a wall as the hyenaboy tried to physically shake these thoughts and whispers and noise from his head, whimpering, murmuring, and growling in frustration to himself in turn when they would not dislodge. Alien thoughts, alien world, here it was, it just looked the same. Is the other reality left behind with the dead things? Is a great monster coming to devour it all? What if they were looking for him? They’d never find him, ever. He missed them already.

“Hey, there, boyo… Shh. Let’s get you to bed.” Keeper’s voice was soothing and even, hooking a grounding hand around the thing’s collar because it usually helped to calm him down. Wild beast with all the noise, the voices, the knocking, pounding, slamming knocking on the door so loud little beast let me in LET ME IN skulls of rams on figures in the mist, but why were they hiding, what did they want from him. Why send him here with everything different and yet the same?

“NoOOOOOOooooo” was drawn out in a long and pitiful wail, repeated over and over again staccato as he tried once more to shake these thoughts loose, to shake the hand loose, he was being dragged down and he was terrified that the people in white coats had come to take him away again. He tried to bash the thoughts—they weren’t his they weren’t they were put here all these twisted up impulses who put these here it’s so loud no no no loud they’re screaming they’re screaming and banging on the doors and if they flood his whole head he’ll never come back—he tried to bash them out with his fist, but the Keeper restrained that hand, too, twisting it painfully behind his back until he cried out and it was a relief to feel something real it was a relief and the Keeper was helping, he always helps, but he missed the Keeper from his real home. It was sad and heart-breaking that something was so terribly wrong. If he ever made it back, should he dare breathe of his adventures? People would call him crazy.

“I wanna go home” the Keeper was hearing him plead repeatedly, and he did not know what to say.

“You are home, boyo.”

“I miss my Keeper.” All the noise was giving rise to directionless panic and the voices were laughing at him he didn’t know why he was so scared.

“I am your Keeper.” Keeper’s voice was calm and slow and even.

“No no no. NO. Not you. You’re my Keeper HERE. Back home, the other Keeper, I miss him. I wanna go back he’s probably looking for me.”

“Come on. You need your medicine” Keeper was leading the beast carefully from the room, and the beast watched the shapes melt and change and there was incomprehensible voices raised and all speaking at once. There was a voice that stood out from the rest even as faceless phantoms were creeping in at all angles to impede his progress.

“They don’t want me to take my medicine” The boy was feeling resistant, and he didn’t know how much of it was him and how much of it was the control that the monsters were having over him.

“But you have to. If you take your medicine and get to sleep, when you wake up you’ll be home.”

“Promise”? disappointed and heartbroken already.

“I promise.”

“Promise promise?”

“Promise promise promise.”

The Keeper did not realise what it meant when it had been three times that he’d promised.

On the edges of madness, maybe, the dangerous beast laughs. It’s long and bitter and fraught with struggle and he tries to twist out of the Keeper’s grip, but he can’t. He is inexorably led along and that is a marginally calming notion amidst all the endless chaos.

“If I make it home…” the beast was leery of the declaration and for good reason, how does the Keeper even know for sure, what does he know about this sort of stuff, anyway? How much does he know that he’s not letting on. “If I make it home, I can’t tell my real Keeper about what happened.” He decides aloud. “I don’t want him to worry.”

“You won’t need to tell him, boyo, because he’ll know.” Keeper was trying to be reassuring, trying to sound cheerful, though his heart was so tightly wrung with fear and pity. He was not scared OF his boyo, to be sure, but scared FOR him. The Keeper couldn’t see the monsters and so was not afraid of them. The boy hid behind him and lived every moment of his life at once, and it was all jumbled and piecemeal and some of it wasn’t really his, was it, and it was so impossible to sort through and he knew it would happen again and again and again. The dangerous beast was suspicious—how does this Keeper know so much? How does he know the other Keeper will know? How does he know that the boy would make it home at all?

These questions are urgent, to be sure, but in all his desperation, the boy does not ask them. He *wants* it to work. He *wants* to go home, or at least to the last reality that he’d become somewhat comfortable existing within, and he listens to the kind murmuring of the Keeper, suggestions that he could not help but pay attention to because the Keeper slipped in certain words that inexorably demand attention and now he was listening rapt for them, eyes shut tight and body pressed against the Keeper’s when they were both sitting on the mattress. The boy didn’t quite know how they’d gotten there and all of a sudden he was back at the foot of the stairs and he was shaking his head violently to dislodge all the thoughts, the entire timestream folding back on itself over and over and over again like a ribbon or an accordion, more like, and he did not know if he was at the foot of the stairs imagining being relatively safe, or if he was relatively safe imagining being at the foot of the stairs in grave danger. He did not know if either of these were the case, or neither. It could be three months ago. It could be three years ago. He could be in the hospital, in a coma, dying. He, however, couldn’t be sure. He thus tried to give them all equal weight and footing, but it was an exhausting task.

He was handed a small purple capsule and then a plastic cup of water and he was urged to drink. That, he could do. He wasn’t so helpless that he couldn’t take care of himself, see? The cup trembled in his grip, in both of his hands to try to keep steady, and he seemed perplexed even though he had always had tremors.

“Shhh… Shhhh…” The beast realised he had been whimpering and growling, fruitlessly trying to drive the phantoms away. But the fight soon left him and felt himself relax, but it was okay because the haunting was finally coming to a close.

The Keeper handed the beast half of his grilled cheese sandwich (that had been abandoned when he heard the boy crying for help, though indirectly) with instructions to eat. He had to eat with his medicine or it won’t work properly. This, too, was something that the boy could manage. He felt pathetic for feeling so accomplished at such small tasks, but mostly he was calming down. The little lives were being put out and it was starting to quiet in his head and it was a blessed relief. After he ate, he curled up now on the mattress, looking dazed, yawning.

“Sleep, now. Sleep.” The Keeper’s hand made long soothing circles on his back, and now the Keeper was murmuring what seemed to the boy to be nonsense, reassuring nonsense, though, and the gentleness was soon making him profoundly sleepy.

The Keeper waited for the pill to take effect, until his boy was asleep, snoring lightly. He carefully detangled himself from the boy, now sprawled out, and watched over his sleeping boy and only then would he allow himself to show his worry.


End file.
